I'm wicked good at math, but I totally flubbed a decimal the other day. Here's what happened:

I had to attend a social function for work last week. Well, I didn't "have" to go; I probably could've weaseled out of it, but it was being held at this dude's $30 million house. I simply couldn't WAIT to see what it looked like. After all, according to this article, Madonna sold her house back in 2000 for $7.5 million. So, this place was likely to be approximately four times more awesome than Madonna's house. Who'd pass up a chance to see that?!

As I imagined, it was pretty cool -- kind of like a castle, really. (But, oddly, smaller than what I imagined $30 million should do.)

Anyway, I'm hanging out in this enormous sitting room, talking to our office manager. (I'll call her Republican Biker Chick, or RBC. She rides a Harley and has a sterling ring on her finger that shows two people fucking. Missionary style, for those wondering.) There's a couple hundred people milling about the place, but it doesn't really look crowded. The sitting room had ceilings about 20 feet tall with huge beams. Kind of looked like an Elizabethan theater -- all dark wood and what not. I'm staring up at this outrageous, goth-looking iron chandelier (which must've weighed 300 pounds), and some guy says, "They're motorized."

"What are?" I ask, still looking up.

"The chandeliers."

"Motorized? ... Why?"

"See those huge chains? The whole contraption lowers with an electric motor."

"What the hell for?" I ask.

"Well, how else are you gonna clean them?"

"Oh ... I never thought of that," I reply, adding, "I guess it takes a lot of money to be rich, if you need motorized chandeliers."

The guy walked away. So, I continued my oral admiration of the wealthy with a comparison. I said to RBC, "God damn, this house costs like 30 times what my house did."

She's nice, but not very keen on math, so she just said, "Wow."

But then I realized my error. "Hold on ... That would mean my house cost $1 million. I meant that this house costs 300 times what mine did."

I expected a proportionately bigger wow, but RBC just nodded.

[Bonus points for any literature students: Was the above anticlimax or bathos?]

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